Boulder Magazine Winter/Spring 2007-08
sports feature

The Great Indoors

Climbing gyms rock, with controlled conditions and ever-changing terrain

By Julia Layton

At 9:30 a.m. on a Wednesday, the Boulder Rock Club is playing Motown. The route setters hang happily on their ropes, harnessed in, moving laterally 20 feet above the floor. They’re rearranging the neon-bright handholds on climbing walls, setting new challenges for the Rock Club’s members.

Outside, there’s a chill in the air, and the gym will start filling up by noon, even though conditions for outdoor climbing are ideal. Cold weather means no sweat to mess with your grip. Up on Flagstaff Mountain, all through the winter and early spring, you’ll find people shivering at the base of a rock, waiting their turn.

“I lived for the winter,” says Chris Dye of Boulder, a former full-time climber and current climbing enthusiast. “People take little heaters sometimes, and they’ll bundle up, staying warm till they can try the problem or the route.” Extreme, joint-stiffening cold is bad, but snow is a mere nuisance. If you’re climbing and it starts to snow, you’ve got a good 10 minutes to finish the route before the rock gets wet, Dye says. And there are ways to work around the snow, like throwing a tarp over a boulder so it’ll stay dry in a real storm. Dan Howley, climber and owner of The Spot Bouldering Gym, reports that a friend of his used to climb with a small acetylene torch on snowy days, drying off the holds on his way up the rock.

Who Needs Daylight?

But even hard-core climbers regularly head indoors to a climbing wall. It’s not so much a weather issue; indoor climbing is just different. It offers some things outdoor climbing can’t: fully customizable “problems” and routes, and plenty of light at all times. Most climbers do have jobs, and getting in a daylight climb in Boulder Canyon may not be an option.

“Even if you have a real job, climbing can be an integral part of who you are, what you do. The reason the gym fits is that you can schedule it,” says Mike Alkaitis, general manager of the Boulder Rock Club. You don’t even need a climbing partner who’s free at the same time, since walls in big climbing gyms have auto-belay setups. A mechanical “auto belay” catches the rope if you fall, so you don’t hit the deck, known to most of us as the ground.

Outside, a rope-free climb up a boulder on a snowy day has been known to result in the occasional, rather uncomfortable fall onto a deck of potentially skull-cracking rocks. In a gym, the ground is a flat, cushioned floor. Plus, there’s no chance whatsoever of being hit by a falling rock. For these reasons alone indoor climbing is generally safer than outdoor climbing. But not always. Steve Holmes, owner of Eldorado Wall Co., the company that built the Boulder Rock Club, notes that people tend to let their guard down in the controlled environment of a gym, whereas outdoors they may pay a little more attention. One of the biggest dangers in a busy gym is climber collision. When The Spot gets really busy, there may be a dozen people climbing on a boulder at once. Actual collisions are rare—but, Howley says, “I’ve seen some interesting close calls.”

Photo courtesy Jill Salva

Something for Everybody

Even at the busiest times, there’s plenty of rock to go around. The Spot and the Boulder Rock Club are packed with varied terrain and wide expanses of simulated rock. The Boulder Rock Club focuses on roped climbing, which is the sport most people think of when they think of rock climbing. The path up the rock face is the “route,” and climbers can only fall as far as the rope allows. There are roughly 100 different routes at the Boulder Rock Club at any given time, and route setters put in new ones about every other day. The Spot, on the other hand, has more bouldering than roped climbing. In bouldering, climbers follow a “problem” up a rock that’s maybe 10 feet to 20 feet tall, and there’s no rope. They fall all the way down if they lose their grip. The Spot has more than 200 bouldering problems, and route setters switch out an entire section of the gym at least once a week.

Ever-changing terrain is one of the biggest draws of a climbing gym, but it’s mostly the avid climbers who notice how often new routes and problems go up. For beginners, there’s not a huge difference in the climbing experience at different indoor-climbing sites. Boulder County’s municipal recreation centers, university gyms and private general-fitness clubs are fully equipped to introduce novices to the sport. The fact that rec-center walls might have more uniform terrain, and the routes get changed less often, isn’t much of an issue when you’re just starting out. But variety is what gets you into the gym when you climb three days a week.

Climbing in the cold on Petit Grepon in Rocky Mountain National Park. Photo courtesy Alpine Creative/Topher Donahue

An Artistic Endeavor

To keep their members coming back, climbing gyms invest in the art of route setting. A route setter arranges movable holds to create new routes or problems, and assigns them a particular difficulty level. In the United States, the typical rating system runs from 5.0 to 5.14. Howley roughly equates a 5.4 to climbing a ladder. Serious climbers consider route setters to be true professionals. At the Boulder Rock Club, members vote for their favorite setters, the ones who create paths up the rock that best challenge their skills.

Climbing can be a very personal, creative pursuit, and route setters who’ve been around for a while can develop a real following. “You might come in and know you really like Greg’s route. You like the way your body goes,” explains Jill Salva, a longtime climber and mountain guide who also works as a sales specialist at the Boulder Rock Club. “For a lot of people, it’s really artistic,” she goes on, animated now. “People may come in with a dance background, and might find they’re discovering new moves—interesting ways the body interprets what the route setters put up.” But it’s not as if you have to follow a specific route up the rock, Salva adds. Climbing gyms, like the community they serve, are pretty relaxed, despite the intricacy of the sport at the upper levels. “A lot of people come in and just ‘Christmas tree’ it—they do whatever they want up the wall. There’s no right or wrong.”

In a lot of ways, a climbing gym is just like any other type of gym: The workout is only part of the experience. There’s a more social, laid-back atmosphere than you’ll find outdoors. The ascent of a real rock that might beat you requires serious focus, especially when it starts to snow. But inside, the rock is always dry. There are people to meet, watch, assist, show off for, trade pointers with and hit on. There’s stuff to win. At The Spot, some of the bouldering problems have bounties attached to them—cash prizes for a successful ascent. More than five years after the gym opened, at least four of those bounties are still unclaimed, Howley says, even with some of Boulder County’s top climbers among The Spot’s members. The hardest of those problems might carry a bounty of up to $1,000. But it’s not really about the money. “It’s the glory,” Howley says with a smile.

And the glory’s not just for the experts. Indoor climbing is a fairly egalitarian world: Novices are welcomed, sometimes even enthusiastically encouraged by veteran climbers, most of whom are openly in love with their sport. In almost all competitions, novices compete right alongside the Climbing World Cup champions. Of course, you’ll find the occasional climbing snob, just as in any sport, but those are the exception, not the rule.

A 20-foot, “real rock,” home climbing wall. Photo courtesy TJ Mahlin/Monolithic Sculpture, Inc.

Climbers Gotta Climb

With new people picking up the climbing bug every day, the sport is spreading quickly, especially in ultra-fit Boulder County. It’s leaving the gym and entering homes and businesses. Monolithic Sculpture, Inc., built a 12-foot-tall sandstone rock in the Boulder Outlook Hotel, a climbable tribute to Boulder’s special brand of obsessive athleticism. Eldorado Wall Co. has built a climbing wall in at least one law office in Boulder County, as well as one in Google’s Boulder location on the 1400 block of Pearl Street. Google doesn’t allow people past the front door to get pictures, but Holmes describes it as a 12-foot-tall by 24-foot-wide boulder.

Both Eldorado and Monolithic get calls for residential walls, but Holmes says most calls end without an order. “We’ll explain the pros and cons, and we’ll get to the pricing question pretty darn quickly, and that usually ends the conversation right there,” says Holmes. TJ Mahlin, design manager at Monolithic, estimates that a “no-frills, pure-function” wall might cost in the area of $30,000. A really impressive one moves into the $80,000 zone.

But not everyone is deterred by the price. There are “real rock” walls in a few of Boulder County’s posher residences. Sometimes a climber’s gotta climb, and acetylene torches aren’t for everyone.

Read Boulder Magazine's web-only article "How to Build A Simple Climbing Wall"

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